Birmingham prepares for newspaper war

Trinity Mirror has closed a glossy lifestyle magazine in Birmingham, called Living, in order to concentrate its resources on fighting off next week's expected launch of a new newspaper.

The publisher of the Birmingham Mail, Coventry Telegraph and Birmingham Post is eager to protect its hold on the Birmingham market as free newspaper entrepreneur Chris Bullivant prepares to publish what he has called a "quasi-paid-for" title.

He has said his Birmingham Press will have a core sale of around 5,000 supplemented by 20,000 copies delivered free to upmarket suburbs like Harborne and Moseley.

Now staff from TM's Living magazine will be seconded to an as-yet-unspecified project to compete with the Press. It may be a beefed-up version of TM's existing weekly free newspaper, the Mail Extra.

Bullivant believes the Press will fill a gap that opened up once the Post switched from daily to weekly publishing, a market missed by the (allegedly) "downmarket" Mail.

"People say I'm attacking Trinity Mirror," Bullivant said, "but I attack monopolies and I attack markets. I am going in with a relatively low-cost model to service a part of the market that has been let down.

"People ask why I'm doing this and the answer is simple – because it's my city."

The launch editor of the Press is Tony Lennox, a former editorial director of TM's weekly newspapers.